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A Piece of Internet History Lost: IO.com Sold, Services To Shut Down
An anonymous reader writes "The former Illuminati Online domain, IO.com, has been sold, and all existing customers will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, then owner of the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain led to the creation of the EFF and was an important milestone in the fight for online rights. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years." Bad news for me — io.com was my first real ISP, and I was hoping to see if I could revive the account.
let's just hope they don't use it for ill, intentionally or otherwise. Think about it, among other things whoever owns that domain now will be able to intercept all mail to io.com accounts, and with the quickness and suddenness of the transfer not everyone's who uses those addresses is going to be able to completely transition off them before the transfer happens
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
clearly he was on AOL before IO
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Phone numbers (like 867-5309), IO.Com, Chat account numbers (like IRC, Skype, ICQ), Slashdot uid's; they all have something in common:
jurisdiction.
When you register something, you have no control over it but to administer it for a short while in the influence of the registrar perview.
All these registration systems build a false sense of commerce and security.
Tor, Meshnet, and Peer-to-peer networks are hated because they are devoid of the impulses that cause a registration to be necessary: and those are the limiting of your activities through regulation.
Looks like /. managed to take it down early. Good Job everyone!
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
Secret Service raid...Illuminati...led to the creation of the EFF
I knew it! The FOSS movement was a Freemason conspiracy to establish a New World Order through software infiltration. First they took over the server OS market, now they are aiming for the desktop market shares, after that, the entire world!
The security issue here is identity theft. If you have access to someone's email account, you can pretend to be him. In this case, the new owner of the domain doesn't have access to old mail, but they do have access to new mail sent to those accounts. Any verification mail sent to those accounts will end up in the hands of the new owner, without the original user of that email account ever knowing.
I remember in my BBS days reading about the SJ Games raid by the Secret Service.
And as soon as I discovered local internet access (mostly through a borrowed account on a VAX at a local school), I started giving SJG's io.com $10/month for a shell account.
But it wasn't just a shell: It was a FreeBSD shell, back when Linux was still a toy, and it had an infallible NetApps backend with snapshots for ~ (which is still rare, even in this day of positively cheap disk storage). It was access to a good news spool, when Usenet was still Usenet. It was a short email address, when such things weren't so special. It was an Apache web server, with a few megabytes of disk quota and plenty of slack if you needed more from time to time. AAnd a personalized anonymous FTP server. And a proper dev environment for building your own software from source.
All on a fast T1. (Remember when a T1 was fast, and a Pentium-based FreeBSD box with 32 or 64MB of RAM could host more than 100 concurrent interactive users? You yungin's will say it's impossible, but it worked well.)
And the operators and managers seemed to actually give a shit about their users' needs. There was a sense of community between the users and the folks running the show that I've never seen elsewhere.
Things were different back then. The web was mostly text, Gopher still was useful, I never minded using Lynx as a browser, and the world's former-best music/discography site (cdnow.com) had an extremely functional and fast interface using...telnet.
Back them, if you wanted new dirt on the latest Linux happenings, you'd look at Matt Welsh's page, as there just weren't any others that were worth keeping up with.
I remember Steve Jackson himself writing on io.com's news (which was more of a .plan than a modern blog) about how he'd given every single desktop in his company proper Internet access, and how he (rightly!) suspected that his was one of the first companies to do so.
Eventually, my io.com account was banished due to a copyright complaint from an outside party. But by then I'd already built my own *nix boxen, and a more proper local ISP than the 9600bps VAX/VMS beast had cropped up that was both worthwhile and was feeding me dual-channel ISDN as a favor, so I never bothered to fight the copyright complaint.
But I still remember the IP address for pentagon.io.com (their first, and primary shell server) from way back when: 199.170.88.5. And I still ping "io.com" when troubleshooting network connectivity: It's a fast and easy way to see that DNS works and that packets are making their way to Texas and back.
But I guess that's gone now, too.
Goodbye, io.com.
Kid-proof tablet..
Back in the early '90s, there were two kinds of service that you could dial into (aside from bulletin board systems). Online Service Providers (OSPs) offered a large walled-garden network. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provided Internet access. ISPs might have hosted some content (e.g. web or FTP sites for their users), but all of this content was accessible by anyone on any ISP. OSPs hosted content that was only visible within their network. Often, OSPs didn't use TCP, but many of them did provide Internet access via some tunnelling mechanism. Quite often, OSPs would charge more for Internet access than for access to their internal network. Two of the big OSPs were AOL and CompuServe. These typically gave you a fixed number of normal minutes online per month, but charged you more per minute for premium services, of which Internet access was one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've been jimm@io.com since 1994 or so --- maybe a year or two earlier than that. You know what I'm worried about most? All those open source projects, emails, and other digital resources that point to jimm@io.com are going to be pointing nowhere in a month. It feels like my online identity is being stolen. Except it's not being stolen, of course --- merely recalled.
io.com was bought by prismnet.com years ago. PrismNet changed hands a few times. The last guy who sold it to the current owner (for $20) didn't sell the io.com domain. He kept it but let them use it---until July 1, 2011.
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
I'm posting Anon so my brothers will not know it was me that let the secret out. You see Steve Jackson stole the domain from us Masons years ago. We were setting it up for secret online meetings and to hold the secret Mason Wiki for Master Mason access to find out what other Worshipful Masters were up to and to see live camera feeds of the holy grail as it toured the world as well as the other lesser artifacts like water from the fountain of youth, and the secret film of Kennedy being kidnapped by our secret mason strike squad and replaced with a life like dummy. etc...
WE now have it back once again! Our power is now complete! Unite my brothers!
I am glad to let the secret out, They would kill me if I posted this under my real account and traced it back to me!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.